Penn Satire, Since 1899

A Letter from the University of Pennsylvania Research and Thesis Review Board

Dear Jonah,

My name is Claire Thomas, and I am the president of the Research and Thesis Review Board here at Penn. We received your submission, ‘On Sound’, on April 1st, 2011, and unfortunately have declined to accept it for publication. Our reasons follow:

Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, your thesis, that “Sound equals time minus sight”, was neither explained nor even elaborated on in your paper. In fact, it was not even mentioned after the fourth page. We at Penn publishing require all hypotheses to be scientifically backed.

Secondly, we require all Penn publications to be written in black font. The pale yellow ink was very difficult to see, and as a result it took each of us several hours to read your paper. Please use black ink in the future.

There were several logical and factual fallacies in your paper as well. Assuming for “simplicity’s sake” that the Book of Latter Day Saints is historically accurate is not reasonable. Escaping from the Bronze Age is not a “persistent struggle we all must face” as historians place the end of this period around 700 BC. Also, the Michelin Man is not a real person, salad has not been linked to decreased sexual performance, the steam engine has been invented, and bicycles are not capable of producing offspring (and accordingly, tricycles are not ‘baby bicycles’).

We at the review board question the amount of effort you put into compiling this paper in general. Besides the unbelievable quantity of spelling and grammatical errors (in fact, more words were misspelled than not), several pages were missing and others were not relevant to the topic. Page 9, for example, is a letter addressed to George Washington Carver with over 50 new ideas for peanut-based inventions. Page 27 is a list of movies to see with asterisks next to those available on Netflix Instant Streaming, and pages 32-34 are covered in gum.

The review board also challenges your citation methods and academic integrity. Penn requires articles for publication to have either MLA or APA regulation citations. We are not sure which model you are using, but we find it unacceptable for footnote citations to simply be a ranking of favorite Ben and Jerry’s flavors. Additionally, several pages of your paper included transcripts of Growing Pains episodes. This is a form of plagiarism, and we at Penn only approve plagiarized works from established professors.

Thank you for your submission, and we hope you will take our suggested revisions under consideration. Penn encourages all undergraduates to participate in research, and if the end of humanity is as close as you say it is, we at the review board would be interested in publishing a work that proves this in a more professional and scientific manner.

Best,
Claire Thomas, on behalf of the University of Pennsylvania Research and Thesis Review Board